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Having seen a reference to the charity ShelterBox and the aid it provides it’s made me think (a dangerous situation).

My first choice in an emergency is to get home asap where our preps are and we would be safest.

If we need to evacuate our home on a temporary basis or bug out long term we would use our camper van which is always well stocked with food, clothing and bedding etc. for holiday use, and in a few minutes can be loaded with ready made up crates with extra supplies, freeze dryed food, water filters and jerrycans, medicines, extra clothing, a spade and tools.

But if there was a problem with the camper what then?. Over the years we have accumulated a lot of camping gear, if it was all together, tent, gas stoves and spare cartridges, billy cans and canteen sets, lamps etc, if it’s all in one box throw it in the car, box of food, meds and bug out bag and of we go.

If we have time I drive the camper and my wife drives the car, the more preps the merrier, and our long term safety is increased.
Just a thought PG but what kind of coms do you have between those vehicles?

Over the curse of my lifetime I have made several attempts at what might be referred too as "group trips" involving several vehicles. Keeping the group together in traffic is almost impossible and even on the open road there will be stragglers and others trying to zip ahead to the point that it becomes a WRC race.

That is one reason military convoys travel at the pace of the slowest vehicle, when one stops all stop, and an officer is placed at both front and rear of the unit. They also generally have a scout vehicle running ahead and reporting back with traffic and road condition info.

In reality, if things have already gotten dicey before you leave you have waited too long.

This link is to real news footage of a real evacuation incident, not an imaginary scenerio. We do evacuations in large scale on a regular basis and no one has figured out how to make it work smoothly yet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BCFXofkWlc
I'm surprised with the hurricane experience that Florida has, that they haven't worked out a system of ramp closure gates and telemetry to convert all eight lanes of the Interstate to all go the same way out of Dodge. In Virginia the I64 corridor, all eight lanes between Virginia Beach, Newport-News, Camp Peary, Fort Story, Langley AFB, NAS Norfolk, Dam Deck and Littler Creek Amphib base go west bound only clear top Richmond. It takes about an hour to close the eastbound ramps, divert eastbound traffic onto US58 or I95 and have VSP sweep the eastbound lanes clear and reverse the traffic flow. They do it once a year just for practice.
We are talking about Florida CH, Half the population is retired Yankees and the other half is Cuban.

They probably did close down all the lanes and the flow you see going south is the portion that said F-that, flipped off the FSP and refused to leave the highway,
MB, I suppose you are quite correct. I suppose some percentage are even Brit, Japanese, Singapore, or HK expats whose first impulse is to drive on the other side of the motorway anyhow... All is lost. 8-)
(27 January 2018, 17:51)Mortblanc Wrote: [ -> ]Just a thought PG but what kind of coms do you have between those vehicles?

Over the curse of my lifetime I have made several attempts at what might be referred too as "group trips" involving several vehicles. Keeping the group together in traffic is almost impossible and even on the open road there will be stragglers and others trying to zip ahead to the point that it becomes a WRC race.

That is one reason military convoys travel at the pace of the slowest vehicle, when one stops all stop, and an officer is placed at both front and rear of the unit. They also generally have a scout vehicle running ahead and reporting back with traffic and road condition info.

In reality, if things have already gotten dicey before you leave you have waited too long.

This link is to real news footage of a real evacuation incident, not an imaginary scenerio. We do evacuations in large scale on a regular basis and no one has figured out how to make it work smoothly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BCFXofkWlc

Hi MB, we would not evacuate our home after tshtf unless we were in mortal danger, in which case we would just go to the nearest place we have reconed, just 6 miles away and out of the conovation.

If there was a continual deterioration in society, and we could see no end to it, we would leave with all our preps to an area we have been camping in for many years, where we have friends, our home is only bricks and mortar and can be repaired or replaced, our coms are a pair of motorola T60s, and an old pair of binitones.
We would not willingly move if we thought it dangerous
(27 January 2018, 20:16)CharlesHarris Wrote: [ -> ]MB, I suppose you are quite correct. I suppose some percentage are even Brit, Japanese, Singapore, or HK expats whose first impulse is to drive on the other side of the motorway anyhow... All is lost. 8-)

Charles us brits ride and drive on the correct side of the road, the left, so can hold the reigns in your left hand and your sword in your right............
(27 January 2018, 20:16)CharlesHarris Wrote: [ -> ]MB, I suppose you are quite correct. I suppose some percentage are even Brit, Japanese, Singapore, or HK expats whose first impulse is to drive on the other side of the motorway anyhow... All is lost. 8-)

Charles us brits ride and drive on the correct side of the road, the left, so can hold the reigns in your left hand and your sword in your right............
You will note that I did not say the "wrong" side of the road, I clearly said "other."

On The Right Side of the Road
by Richard F. Weingroff

The [US] Federal Highway Administration has often been asked about the American practice of driving on the right, instead of the left, as in Great Britain, our "Mother Country." Albert C. Rose, who served as "unofficial historian" of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads during much of his long career with the agency (1919-1950) researched why.

Rose found that, "All available evidence seems to indicate that the RIGHT-HAND travel predominated in Colonial America from the time of the earliest settlements." The ox-team, the horseback rider, the handler of the lead horse, and even the pedestrian all traveled to the right. Travelers with hand guns carried their weapons in the hollows of their left arms and traveled to the right, the better to be ready if an oncoming stranger proved dangerous:

When wagons came into general use, they were hauled by two, four or six horses and the driver rode the left rear (wheel) horse like the Old World position. Handling the reins or jerk line with the left hand [and] the long black-snake whip with the right, these drivers traveled to the right so as to watch more closely the clearance at the left. The heavy Conestoga wagons introduced about 1750, in the vicinity of Lancaster, Pa., gave an added impetus to right-hand travel. The drivers rode the left wheel horse, postilion fashion, or rode the "lazy board" at the left side of the wagon, or walked along the road at the left side of the horses.

He also noted a "smoldering opposition to customs of the Old World."

Thus no valid reason existed for transplanting the English left-hand rule especially since the nationals of other European countries had established in America widely separated settlements in which their own customs were observed.

Australian historian M. G. Lay agreed with Rose that the Conestoga wagon provided a "major impetus for right-hand driving in the United States":

The wagon was operated either by the postilion driver riding the left-hand near horse-called the wheel horse-or by the driver walking or sitting on a "lazy board" on the left-hand side of the vehicle. He kept to the left in both cases in order to use the right hand to manage the horses and operate the brake lever mounted on the left-hand side. Passing therefore required moving to the right to give the driver forward vision.

Rose found that no formal rule of the road was adopted by the new country or any State until 1792. In that year, Pennsylvania adopted legislation to establish a turnpike from Lancaster to Philadelphia. The charter legislation provided that travel would be on the right hand side of the turnpike. New York, in 1804, became the first State to prescribe right hand travel on all public highways. By the Civil War, right hand travel was followed in every State. Drivers tended to sit on the right so they could ensure their buggy, wagon, or other vehicle didn't run into a roadside ditch.

Lay also emphasized the ditches as an influence:

With the growth of traffic, the roadside ditches also led to a growing tendency in the United States in the late nineteenth century for drivers of light horse-drawn vehicles to both drive on the right and sit on the right to avoid the greater evil of the ditch. It was also common practice with bench-seated drivers of single-line horse drawn carriages, where the need to accommodate the whip in the right hand predominated.

When inventors began building "automobiles" in the 1890's, they thought of them as motorized wagons. As a result, many early cars had the steering mechanism-a rudder (or tiller), not a wheel-in the center position where the side of the road didn't make any difference. Lay points out that technical innovation created the configuration we are familiar with in the United States:

However, with the introduction of the steering wheel in 1898, a central location was no longer technically possible. Car makers usually copied existing practice and placed the driver on the curbside. Thus, most American cars produced before 1910 were made with right-side driver seating, although intended for right-side driving. Such vehicles remained in common use until 1915, and the 1908 Model T was the first of Ford's cars to feature a left-side driving position.

By 1915, the Model T had become so popular that the rest of the automakers followed Ford's lead.

Lay traced the first regulation of one-side-or-the-other to the Chinese bureaucracy of 1100 B.C. The Book of Rites stated: "The right side of the road is for men, the left side for women and the center for carriages." This Western Zhou dynasty rule applied only to the dynasty's wide official roads and was "more concerned with protocol than avoiding head-on collisions." Over 3,000 years later, Lay concluded, "there are no technical reasons for preferring driving on either the left or the right side of the road."

Reference:
Ways of the World: A History of the World's Roads and the Vehicles that Used Them (Rutger's University Press, 1992)
I have always thought that a big part of the positioning of the American driver on the left side of the vehicle was due to better control of shifting gears with he dominant hand.

Most people are so dominantly right handed that they can not wave bye-bye with their left hand, so using it to steady the steering wheel while the right hand shifts the gears is easier on the driver.

I have watched many Americans try to run a "fast lap" on Top Gear and the most difficult part for them is always shifting with the left hand.